You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.

At the hospital they started me on Pitocin, since I wasn’t yet contracting. Contraction feels inadequate to describe what was happening inside me, but during labor all language was inadequate. I had never felt pain that exquisite before, and I haven’t since, at least not physically. That pain, so deep inside, deep and beyond reach, made me want to jump out a plate glass window.

“Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.” Next question.

Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.

I felt it was the kids and me, day after day, most of the time. I felt that the fourth member of the family rowed away from our island to work, and then rowed back to us, but we three lived there. That was daily life.

It feels invasive to even consider what it might have felt like to be the one in the boat, oars in both hands. To go away and come back, again and again, and to miss so much living. It is a kind of estrangement, maybe, to be the one who works outside of the home.

Maybe it’s only possible to travel very far away if one is already used to rowing.

How I picture it: For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. —Maggie Nelson

This is what I do. I hear myself doing it even now: When I get to the most painful part of the telling, I laugh. I break that part into bits. I laugh through the words I have to say, have to hear myself say, have to let hang in the air.

We can endure anything if we know when it will end.

I woke up that morning around 7:00 as usual. Our shared parenting agreement stipulated that the children would be dropped off at my house at noon. Five hours. I could do this. Downstairs I turned on the Christmas lights, let the dog out and filled her bowl with food, then went back upstairs to put on my winter running clothes. I did my best to outrun my sadness, my usual playlist cycling through Prince, Metric, Talking Heads, Neko Case, The Clash. I took my favorite route around my neighborhood, passing houses lit with Christmas or Hannukah lights, and the one plastic nativity with Joseph tipped over in the grass, Mary and the baby Jesus still upright, managing on their own. (Tale as old as time, I thought to myself.)

I didn’t forget the global pandemic or my government’s slide toward full-on fascism. I didn’t leave behind the stresses of being self-employed or my concerns about keeping my children healthy—physically and mentally—during that time. But I let myself feel something other than all that.

I thought that I was vanishing, but instead I was only coming true. —Clive James

Kathryn described emotional alchemy as being related to how we metabolize experience.

Was the deal that we’d both freeze at the instant of “I do” and not grow or change or succeed or fail or suffer or triumph from that day forward, till death do us part? Or was the deal that he could grow and change, choosing a new career entirely, an incredibly demanding career, and that I would have to put my own dreams on hold because I made less money? Was that the deal?

That night Violet said something that snapped a piece of my heart clean off. I won’t write it here. For a while I carried it inside me like a small, sharp thing that cut me when I moved wrong.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

But feeling lonely when you’re with your partner is worse than being alone. Being with someone who doesn’t want the best for you is worse than being alone.

“How much is caregiver part of your identity? In what ways might you be keeping others down in order to stay up?” Caroline, the intuitive therapist, wasn’t letting me off the hook. “Do you need to remain the parent, even in adult relationships?” I was quiet—I had to sit with that, chew on it, metabolize it—but she filled the silence. “Think about what caregiving requires—people who need you. Even if you’re not trying to dominate, caregiving is a kind of dominance. Have you surrounded yourself with people who are more submissive? Needier?”

I’ve never felt better. I’ve never felt worse. Your absence has made the life I have now possible. In which case, thank you. I didn’t ask for more pain, but I received it—you sent it—and it changed me. Thank you.

What now? I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. But here’s the thing about carrying light with you: No matter where you go, and no matter what you find—or don’t find—you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it. This flickering? It’s mine. This path is mine.

—I could say it’s difficult to forgive someone who hasn’t expressed remorse. I could counter with questions: Why do I need to forgive someone who doesn’t seem to be sorry? What if forgiveness doesn’t need to be the goal? The goal is the wish: peace. Can there be peace without forgiveness? How do you heal when there is an open wound that is being kept open, a scab always being picked until it bleeds again? I could say this is my task: seeking peace, knowing the wound may never fully close—

To feel at peace is to be free.

Something about being at the ocean always reminds me of how small I am, but not in a way that makes me feel insignificant. It’s a smallness that makes me feel a part of the world, not separate from it.